Ernst Krenek was consistently an artist of his time. From a survey of his 200-plus compositions, ranging from operas and ballets to symphonies, string quartets, and solo piano music, one hears Krenek moving in lockstep with the musical evolution of each passing decade. Although he was never part of the avant-garde at any moment in his career, he consistently adapted his style to align with the latest innovations.
But Krenek didn’t foresee becoming such a chameleonic composer at the beginning of his career. In his early 20s he had one mission in mind: to write in the style of the late Gustav Mahler, whose titanic, heaven-storming opuses proved a major milestone in the development of the Austro-German symphony. At the same time, Krenek grew close to Alma Mahler, Gustav’s widow, and the couple’s oldest daughter Anna, whom Ernst wedded in early 1924—a tumultuous marriage that ended before their first anniversary.
Emotionally distraught by his impending divorce and caught at a crossroads in his burgeoning career, Krenek embarked on a journey to Paris in the fall of 1924 that would transform his approach to composition. During his trip, he met Igor Stravinsky and members of Les Six, a Parisian composer collective producing music that mixed elements of Baroque and Classical style with those of cabaret, vaudeville, and—most intriguing of all to Krenek—American jazz. “I decided that the tenets which I had followed so far in writing ‘modern’ music were totally wrong. Music, according to my new philosophy, had to fit the well-defined demands of the community for which it was written. It had to be useful, entertaining, practical,” Krenek later wrote.
His epiphany mirrored that of many European artists during the 1920s. From the smoldering ashes of World War I emerged a new wave of musical thought, Neoclassicism, which prized objectivity, accessible musical language, and a cool, even whimsical sensibility. Neoclassicism became Krenek’s musical focus for the next five years, culminating in his raucous, jazzy Kleine Symphonie (Little Symphony).
Completed in 1928, Kleine Symphonie marks the end of Krenek’s Neoclassical period. As opposed to the large orchestras required of his previous works, Krenek removes the oboes, horns, violas, and cellos. The entire string body is composed of just violins, basses, harp, and—in a nod to Les Six—a group of mandolins, banjos, and guitar.
But rather than eschew every element of the symphonic tradition, Krenek attempts to reconcile past and present. Kleine Symphonie follows the three-movement structure of the 18th-century symphony, but Krenek turns this traditional form on its head by introducing hallmarks of 1920s music: a saucier approach to harmonic dissonance, the spiky rhythmic distortions he admired in the music of Stravinsky and Bartók, and iridescent rainbows of instrumental color that speak to European culture’s feverish obsession with le Jazz Hot.
Krenek’s playful mixing of old and new begins in the first bars of the introduction, where he introduces three elements that will drive the first movement’s action: a series of Mozartean fanfares; a jagged melody that emerges from the gravelly contrabassoon; and jaunty dance rhythms that quickly accelerate, plunging us into the main body of the movement. Rather than give listeners the ecstasy of a bright, brassy finish, the music quietly disappears like the final plume of smoke from a cigarillo.
The central movement is built around an obsessive ostinato in the guitar and harp, written in a set of changing asymmetrical meters that prevent the music from ever finding a stable groove. Over this foundation a series of instruments take turns singing a minor-key aria teeming with bluesy arabesques.
For the finale, Krenek delivers a deliriously spirited rondo, always giving the ear clear anchor points as the rowdy music traverses new territories of harmony and rhythm. Dominated throughout by the repetition of hammer-like chords that call to mind the fierce dissonance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the music builds to a fury of sound as this little symphony marches headfirst into its cheeky, high-octane conclusion.
—Michael Cirigliano
In the decade following Gustav Mahler’s death in 1911, many considered the hushed, ethereal beauty that closes his Ninth Symphony to be the composer’s farewell to the world. Infused with many elements of personal history, he appeared to go gently into that good night. Yet Mahler’s life carried on.
In June 1910—a year after completing the Ninth Symphony and having finished his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic—he traveled to his summer home at Toblach in the Austrian countryside, ready to begin constructing the universe of his next symphony. But by late July, fate brought a new crisis to his front door.
Mahler received a piece of mail addressed to Herr Direktor Mahler—inside was a statement of love from German architect Walter Gropius to his wife, Alma, imploring her to leave her husband and start life anew with Gropius. Overcome with grief, Mahler demanded his wife decide between the two men. Alma confirmed she would stay married to Mahler (though in secret, she continued her affair).
Alma’s infidelity paralyzed Mahler, yet the Mahlers’ marriage, admittedly, wasn’t a fulfilling one for Alma. She had been forced to set aside her own work as a composer and was constantly sidelined by her husband’s taxing schedule. The couple was still grieving the 1907 death of their youngest daughter, and the move to New York only exacerbated Alma’s feelings of grief and isolation.
Caught in a tailspin of guilt, Mahler acknowledged his wife’s sufferings for the first time, and he resolved to rededicate himself to their marriage in several love poems, one of which foretold the mission of his new symphony:
Let me condense the tremors of my yearning
The eternity of bliss divine in your embrace
Into one great song.
Mahler left Toblach in September with his 10th Symphony fully sketched—a manuscript he never touched again. Immediately after his death, rumors regarding the condition of his final symphonic score began to swirl. Some claimed Mahler demanded the manuscript be burned, while others assumed any existing drafts were the delirious scribblings of a tortured soul.
After keeping the manuscript under lock and key for 13 years, Alma decided in 1924 to release it through two actions. First, she authorized a Viennese publisher to issue a facsimile edition of Mahler’s manuscript. And second, she requested that her son-in-law, the composer Ernst Krenek, complete the work ahead of a performance in Vienna later that year.
The facsimile pages of Mahler’s manuscript confirmed the foundation of a five-movement work similar in form to his Fifth and Seventh symphonies. He even completed the full orchestral score of the vast opening Adagio. But the newly published score also showed the emotional crisis Mahler endured as he worked on the symphony. Throughout, he etched phrases, such as:
O Lord, why hast thou forsaken me? ...
Madness, take hold of me, the accursed one ...
To live for you! To die for you! Almschi!
In many ways, Krenek was an ideal choice to take on the task of completing the 10th’s score. Aside from being married to Mahler’s oldest daughter, he had expressed a desire “to become the successor of Mahler in the field of the symphony.” But Krenek ultimately declined. He deemed only the opening Adagio and the central movement, titled “Purgatorio,” ready for performance, realizing the sketches for the two scherzos and finale would involve, in his words, “guesswork pure and simple ... paraphrasing upon the ideas of a departed master.”
Incomplete movements aside, the opening Adagio offers a roadmap of the new avenues Mahler was forging. The 10th anticipates the complex rhythms and annihilation of tonality a new generation of composers would begin to employ throughout the 1910s and ’20s.
Mahler frames his Adagio around three alternating ideas: a searching, otherworldly melody whispered by unaccompanied violas; a song of radiant intensity dominated by the burnished tones of violins and horns; and a sly, sardonic dance tune that scurries about the orchestra as woodwinds cast spells with fluttered tongues and trembling trills.
After Mahler has captured our attention with the nostalgic sweep and sway of this familiarly romantic material, he plunges us into uncharted territory. A terrifying maelstrom erupts from the full orchestra: Broken chords swirl about in the strings and harp as winds and brass intone a mournful chorale. The dance tune tries to reemerge, only to be cast aside by grisly shrieks from the violins and trumpet and a layering of ear-shattering dissonances—the nine-tone wall of sound often referred to as the symphony’s “chord of catastrophe.”
Having come so close to the existential abyss, the music quickly takes a step back and attempts to regain its original strength. The violin’s opening melody returns in fragmented form, but the warmth and vitality heard at the beginning of the movement have been replaced by a sense of wary, breathless relief. As the gentle, major-key chord that closes the movement evaporates in the ether, Mahler shows us that life must go on.
—Michael Cirigliano
During the summer before seventh grade, I would often stay up until three or four in the morning listening to WFMT, the classical music station in Chicago, where I grew up. With my tape deck and a stack of blank cassettes at the ready, I would record works from the broadcast. Later, I would find the scores to the music so I could study the inner workings of these pieces—so I too could become a composer one day.
One night I heard something unlike anything I had ever heard before: the pizzicato movement of Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet. The harmonic language was like nothing I’d ever encountered: The interaction of the lines was so interesting and complex, and the fourth movement was as wild as any of the heavy metal my friends were listening to at that time.
The next morning, I ran straight to our local library—I arrived before the doors were unlocked—so I could verify that music like this really existed. I found the 1940 Juilliard String Quartet mono recording of Bartók’s Third and Fourth string quartets and quickly began to wear out the vinyl. It was like an alien language, but somehow, I intuitively knew what everything meant in detail. While my middle-school peers listened to Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, Bartók was my Metallica.
One reason the recording resonated with me profoundly was these dissonant and often brutal-sounding works accurately reflected what I was witnessing in my life. My parents were going through marital conflicts, and this aggressive and hostile music represented very powerfully the discordance I felt at home. Bartók wasn’t depicting an ideal or the way things should be; he was depicting the way things often are.
The idea of arranging Bartók’s string quartets for orchestra came to me around 2000. At the time, The Cleveland Orchestra was touring with a string-orchestra arrangement of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, which was originally written for string quartet. It occurred to me that some pieces of music, like the Grosse Fuge, are bigger than their original orchestration; they can be expanded tenfold and still sound like themselves. I immediately started thinking about what other quartets would benefit from this treatment. Bartók’s quartets immediately came to mind, but they are so difficult to play that the idea initially seemed impractical. However, the orchestral writing style in the Third String Quartet—as well as its structure as one continuous 17-minute piece in four seamless movements—made that work the best candidate for such an arrangement.
From the beginning of the Third String Quartet, you perceive these blatant, definitive interruptions. An idea will be proposed, and then it will be countered. I originally thought that this back-and-forth depicted the internal dialogue of a single person with multiple personalities. My first attempt at an arrangement reflected this impression. However, the more I studied the piece, the more I realized that there were two consistent and distinct voices that emerged: One is often calmer and more levelheaded; the other is more reactionary and hostile; and together they make up two passionate and complex characters.
With this realization, I turned to Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta for inspiration. In this piece, Bartók divides the string section in two and places them antiphonally on stage. I made a bold choice to follow this model as a means of capturing these two characters. At the same time, I tried to be as faithful to the original score as I could. Compositionally, it showcases Bartók’s genius and his ability to take a tiny, little musical idea and run it through every permutation: forward, backward, inverted, and recapitulated.
—Stanley Konopka
The one-act play The Miraculous Mandarin by Menyhért (Melchior) Lengyel struck a deep nerve in Béla Bartók, who decided to set it to music as soon as he had read it in the literary magazine Nyugat (The Occident). The action of the pantomime is summarized in the score as follows:
In a shabby room in the slums, three tramps, bent on robbery, force a girl to lure prospective victims from the street. A down-at-heel cavalier and a timid youth, who succumb to her attractions, are found to have thin wallets and are thrown out. The third “guest” is the eerie Mandarin. His impassivity frightens the girl, who tries to thaw him by dancing—but when he feverishly embraces her, she runs from him in terror. After a wild chase he catches her, at which point the three tramps leap from their hiding place, rob him of everything he has, and try to smother him under a pile of cushions. But he gets to his feet, his eyes fixed passionately on the girl. They run him through with a sword; he is shaken, but his desire is stronger than his wounds, and he hurls himself on her. They hang him up, but it is impossible for him to die. Only when they cut him down, and the girl takes him into her arms, do his wounds begin to bleed and he dies.
This gruesome scenario was typical of the expressionist dramas created during the Weimar era. In his treatment of this material, Bartók is at his most experimental harmonically and rhythmically, composing music that depicts the action with great vividness. After a frenetic introduction, which portrays the hustle and bustle of a large city, the curtain rises. The three tramps appear and order the girl to stand by the window and lure men from the street. The girl will play her decoy game three times, with her seductive motions rendered by a clarinet solo in an expressive rubato. Each time, the clarinet solo gets more involved and more agitated.
The first visitor, an old cavalier, enters. His awkward gestures are musically expressed in humorous trombone glissandos. He tries to woo the girl—English horn and cello solos provide a mocking accompaniment—but the tramps seize the old man and throw him out, in a short Vivace section dominated by the repeated-note figures of the trumpets.
In the second decoy game, a shy young man appears at the door. He is represented by a dreamy oboe solo; the dance begins with the entrance of the harp, with a theme played by bassoon and violin. Does the girl forget her role for a minute and become attracted to the youth? At any rate, the tramps set her straight and throw out the young man.
The third decoy game leads to the appearance of the Mandarin in a menacing theme for trombones and tuba, set against woodwind tremolos and glissandos for violins and piano. The music hesitates before the girl begins her dance. Out of short melodic fragments played by solo woodwinds, a waltz theme gradually emerges. As the Mandarin begins his frenzied chase after the girl, a wild fugato starts in the orchestra to the thudding accompaniment of the low winds and percussion. At the climactic point of the chase, the Mandarin catches the girl.
The suite version, prepared by Bartók in 1927, ends at this point. It is in fact nothing but the first two-thirds of the original score, with a few concluding measures added for concert use. The rest of the action, the threefold murder and the final catharsis, were cut off to provide a rousing concert ending.
—Peter Laki